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How to Change the Operating System on a Vultr Bare Metal Instance

Updated on 11 September, 2025

Learn how to reinstall or change the operating system on your Vultr Bare Metal server instance.

Changing the instance operating system wipes all data on your server and installs a new file system. This is important when changing your default operating system while maintaining your instance's IP networking information.

Follow this guide to change the operating system on a Vultr Cloud Compute instance using the Vultr Customer Portal, API, CLI, or Terraform.

  • Vultr Customer Portal
  • Vultr API
  • Vultr CLI
  • Terraform
  1. Navigate to Products and click Compute.
  2. Click your target Bare Metal instance to open its management page.
  3. Navigate to the Settings tab.
  4. Click Change OS on the left navigation menu.
  5. Click the OS drop-down to select a new operating system and the default RAID configuration.
  6. Click Change OS to apply the new operating system.
  7. Check the confirmation prompt and click Change OS to reinstall the instance with a new operating system.

  1. Send a GET request to the List Bare Metal Instances endpoint and note the target instance's ID.

    console 
    $ curl "https://api.vultr.com/v2/bare-metals" \
  -X GET \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${VULTR_API_KEY}"

  2. Send a GET request to the List OS endpoint to view all available operating systems and note the target OS ID.

    console 
    $ curl "https://api.vultr.com/v2/os" \
  -X GET \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${VULTR_API_KEY}"

  3. Send a PATCH request to the Update Bare Metal endpoint with a new os_id value to change the instance's operating system.

    console 
    $ curl "https://api.vultr.com/v2/bare-metals/{baremetal-id}" \
  -X PATCH \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${VULTR_API_KEY}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{
    "os_id" : "<new-instance-os-id>"
  }'

  1. List all Bare Metal instances in your Vultr account and note the target instance's ID.

    console 
    $ vultr-cli bare-metal list

  2. List all available operating systems and note the target OS ID.

    console 
    $ vultr-cli bare-metal os list <baremetal-id>

  3. Change the target instance's operating system.

    console 
    $ vultr-cli bare-metal os change <instance-id> --os <os_id>

  1. Open your Terraform configuration for the existing Bare Metal instance.

  2. Update the os_id value in the instance resource to the new operating system.

    terraform 
    resource "vultr_bare_metal_server" "bm1" {
    # ...existing fields (region, plan, label, hostname, etc.)

    os_id = 2284  # New OS ID
}

  3. Apply the configuration and observe the following output:

    Apply complete! Resources: 1 added, 0 changed, 1 destroyed.

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